Dear Toyota

You knew this was coming. In fact, you have known for a long time. For longer than I've owned a car with your brand on it. I'm on my third -- and last -- one. Recent events and discoveries have dismayed me. I read in horror the story covered in the New York Times - Toyota’s Slow Awakening to a Deadly Problem.

How do you go on for 8 years and do so little? 2,000 complaints of unintended acceleration, and only the recording of a deadly accident prompted you to step up your inquiry, after going through multiple government investigations since 2002.

Your customers, those same who remained loyal to your brand, to the mark of uncompromising quality you raised up high, were left wondering and leafing through helpful online recall guides. You put forth that it was Better to Lose Profits and Save Face, and made multiple apologies to that effect.

You made headlines, not the kind you would have wanted to, or could have made -- Subpoenas Hit Toyota on the Eve of Hearing. Did you lose credibility in people's eyes? There's still a lot of uncertainty on what the real problems are. Were the promises for improvement made in haste?

As customers we're left wondering about that $100MM savings from holding off the car recall disclosed in that internal memo, for example. A Super Bowl ad, a Google campaign, SEO/SEM-only blogs set up across the Internet, talks about cross-functional approaches in social media -- your communications are not integrated, nor are they aligned with what matters now.

Here is what matters: your customers.

• customers do vote with their wallet -- 27% say they are not considering buying a Toyota now
• loyalty must be a two-way street -- just like social media programs
• people value honesty -- customers value it especially

I'll be honest with you, you're sending mixed messages. If you care about your customers and there are true problems with the cars, as hearings and testimonies seem to indicate, it looks to me that precious time (and lives) might have been lost while we waited for openness.

As the article in the NYT says:

Asked why Toyota had moved away from a business model that prized quality and openness, Mr. Lentz (president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A.) offered a simple explanation: “We lost sight of our customers.”

"Moving forward" is the company brand tagline. An unfortunate choice of words at the moment. Especially with customers who are stuck with a Toyota car.

Could the Toyota recall crisis be helping the brand?  What do you think?

Comments

[Tom O'Brien]

Valeria:

Wow, I dont' feel so strongly about the Toyota situation - but it isn't personal for me. I guess many are on the same page as you.

FYI I think something is just wrong with the SIM Score if it shows that the recall crisis is helping Toyota's brand.

Tom O'Brien
@tomob

[Valeria Maltoni]

As a loyal customer, I've been waiting for weeks to see if Toyota would start a customer outreach program -- not to market at them, but to provide some clarity.

Joe jaffe had a great post last week about Toyota as well. I should have quoted him here, alas I end up writing late into the night these days. How Toyota can flip the funnel http://www.jaffejuice.com/2010/02/5-ideas-for-toyota.html

It's very tough being a customer today. And people don't need the stress with housing market, banking/Wall Street crashes, and employment uncertainties. In fact, I think all of these factors play a role in companies failing customers.

[PJ Mullen]

I'm a Toyota owner and because of my blog was invited to an event launching the new Sienna minivan that was supposed to take place at the beginning of the month. It was 'postponed' by Toyota because of the recall fiasco.

In retrospect I'm glad it was because after all that has come out I would definitely decline an invitation to attend. My wife wants a Prius, but I'm doing my best to steer her elsewhere because I cannot see giving them any more of our money.

The one thing that surprised me is that they continue to have ads played touting their vehicles when they should be focusing more on telling the public what they are doing to make up for their failures. That $100mm in savings is now a rounding error in what they will have to spend to fix the problems they've created and attempt to regain consumer trust.

[Raul Peters]

You do realize that 2000 complaints on a single issue in 8 years is less than .001% (That's less than 1/1000 of a percent) of their total cars sold in that time period, right? A pedal getting sticky isn't outside the realm of possibility in a vehicle. It would have been very tough for them to know that it could be a systemic issue with that few complaints.

So, I know a lot of people are getting butt hurt and up in arms over this. I know Congress thinks they need to get involved because it's a way to get some TV time. It's all silly. The biggest drop of the ball is by American car companies not capitalizing on Toyota's issues.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@PJ - my biggest concern is that we don't really know what the problem(s) is/are. So, indeed let's focus on the problem. I don't begrudge them running a business, although as Jaffe suggested, their loyal customer base was overlooked in all this.

@Raul - this is a post from a customer. Do you view it silly that a company would not take communications with its customers seriously? How you feel about congress, while interesting, does little to persuade me that I should not feel betrayed by the company as a customer.

[Raul Peters]

I think it's silly that a customer base would place an expectation of communication on something that has complaints of less 1/1000th of a percent of their total. If customers have expectations that skewed then the company is up a creek regardless of the action they take. This is like the people that expected our delivery at FedEx to be 100% on-time. It's like people expecting your advice to work 100% of the time.

Of course that isn't realistic, but with a complaint and failure rate that negligible it is easy to understand (from a customer perspective) that there may not have been a larger issue.

My point is simple. The expectation of communication to the consumer is out of whack when the complaints and issues were hardly a blip on anyone's radar. Does any company really consider anything 1/1000th of a percent with a complaint legitimate? Generally speaking, probably not.

[Valeria Maltoni]

We agree to disagree. In my view, once the issues became public, the company missed an opportunity to enroll its loyal customers in understanding what was going on. Instead, they let the media run with the message.

Dear Raul, if your sister, or wife, or yourself had been impacted by the product, you would have not given a damn about the stats. Just saying. Period. You have a message to send, free to do that on your own blog. You've made your point, I've made mine. Thank you.

Now a question for you -- are you from Toyota? Because my welcome email to you bounced back [Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: ___@yahoo.com]. It would make sense in view of the fact that your comments are really talking "at" me and not addressing the conversation.

[Paul L'Acosta]

Wow, it would be amazing if Mr. Peters was from Toyota.

I agree with your point Valeria on that clinging to a statistic is a lame excuse to try and push this matter to the side. Recalls are made almost every day and the main concern from companies is not to focus on the malfunction of a product but on getting out there immediately and shout: "Hey, sorry, we screwed up and we want to make it better." Openness. That's where Toyota failed.

See you again soon!

[Melody O.]

I've been reading bits and pieces in the news that say there are misfit floor mats and/or accelerators that stick. I don't know. I don't own a Toyota, though I would be unlikely now to consider one. I haven't paid close enough attention to know a lot of details.

Though in my mind, as dated as this will sound, the gold standard of how a brand should act both openly and with celerity in the face of potential product danger, is still the 1982 Tylenol incident where Johnson & Johnson did a massive recall of Tylenol.

Perhaps 1982 was a different world, and information spread far slower but the sluggish Toyota brand response will make customers trust them less.

[Shiv Singh]

Interesting commentary and thank you for the thoughts. I'd like to explain something important about the SIM Score which is excluded from a lot of the commentary surrounding the Mashable post. The SIM Score analysis was based on comparing data from November, December and January. It does not include February which is when the conversation really turned against Toyota. It is worth remembering that when looking at the SIM Score analysis. And I make that point in the Mashable piece too.

Secondly, Edmunds too found a weird buyer intent increase during the end of January when the recall first broke. The real point of the story is how conversations in the social web (reflected in the SIM Score) can serve as a strong signal for counter-intuitive behavior happening online. This isn't just about the SIM Score showing something strange (therefore it appears should be questions) but how it is inline with findings from Edmunds. That behavior did take place.

The data sourcing providers Radian6 or the others aren't perfect and some manual analysis is always required. But they are getting better day by day.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Paul - making things personal by telling someone they're silly for having an informed opinion is not the way to go :) Glad you can see through rationalizations.

@Melody - what seemed to be just mat issues, turned out to be much more. What, we don't know exactly, yet. I hear from my local dealer monthly with marketing pitches. Yet, I've heard nothing about the issues and what the company is doing to fix them. That is not good. Word of mouth always spread fast. Today, we see it while it spreads. This is the difference.

@Shiv - people woke up and realized even if their car may not be impacted directly, it will be in lost valuation. Plus, given all the recalls, you have no certainty that it might not be. So what we're seeing now is the word of mouth by car owners (I think, not scientific). Also, I'm thinking there was a delay in reporting, there always is one in business. So what we may be seeing is the year-end sales activities. The other thought is that sentiment is hard to figure out online. We still write one thing and mean another in most cases. Communication is quite complex and without contextual analysis, or evaluation, we're just picking at the surface.

[Raul Peters]

Ad hominem really is a bit foolish. No, I'm not from Toyota, I just have no interest in receiving emails so I don't put in real email addresses.

It has nothing to do with my family, that's just a strawman, but thanks. Of course if I were impacted it would have mattered. It mattered enough to 2000 people to make a complaint. It still doesn't diminish the fact that the complaints were negligible.

Could they have reacted differently when it became public, but to assume you know the whole story behind why they reacted like they did is not realistic. We've convinced ourselves that transparency is the only answer. We don't know the whole story, thus your point is you believe it would have been better, while you don't have all the details.

You aren't informed completely, you're not on the inside thus it's silly. It isn't personal, you're just taking it that way. It's silly for anyone to make throw an opinion around like that when they don't know all the details of why a decision was made. Could Toyota have been wrong? Sure, but we can't know that because we aren't privy to all the information behind the decision.

[Valeria Maltoni]

It's very convenient for you to say you cannot be bothered to share your info. I respect opposing opinions, even when I don't agree.

Thank you for stating the same information now on three comments. For all we know, this is not even your real name :) Have a nice day.

[Shiv Singh]

@Valeria, you're right sentiment analysis isn't perfect but it is getting better by the day as more and more companies use semantic technologies to tease out the correct sentiment (similar to the way Google improved its search results). There's always a need for human analysis of the sentiment too.

I think there was probably a lag time effect. There are probably a lot of factors at play describing that counter intuitive trend including loyal fans talking about Toyota (as their fans on FB increased), members of the Toyota ecosystem coming to its defense as their business depends on it (dealers for example) and also people talking about the fixes. Needless to say, a very complex issue and an interesting conversation here.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Shiv:

It's still such early days on this kind of measurement. Glad you're factoring in the many factors that could be at play. Context plays a large role online.